Greg Aharonian says that 10K software patents will be issued
last year and this year, at an average of expense of $5K, nearly
all with inadequate reference to prior art. With over 500K books,
dissertations, articles, conference papers, and product
descriptions published, there should be no shortage of references
for any new discovery. (The applicant must cite prior art to
show how the new work differs.) Aharonian's own searches
routinely turn up 24 relevant non-patent references, and
he would seek out at least 48 for use in a litigation.
The 24 figure is similar to the average number of citations in
an IEEE software journal article. Yet searches by the patent
offices in the US, Europe, and Japan turn up an average of about
one non-patent reference and four related patents. (Each patent
organization achieves a similar hit rate, but with emphasis on
it's own database for prior patent citations.) For this search,
the US PTO charges $420 and the European EPO $1537. Aharonian
says that the searches are amazingly superficial, and that your
money would be better spent on a private search (e.g., through
Dialog, or through his service). Patent examiners can search
Dialog, but must pay for both the search time and $10 for any
article ordered -- so it is likely that they work from abstracts
alone to determine relevance. [srctran@world.std.com,
misc.int-property, 1/31/95.]

(If you'd like to help the PTO, they would gladly accept
donations of professional books -- especially those that are
now out of print. Contact Michelle Crecca
.)

In less than 20 years, people can freely use the ideas now
being patented. In the meantime, "if someone sues you for using
their little patented subroutine, tell them you'll start a re-exam
of their patent, threatening with all of this obvious, prior art."
Barry Chapin , misc.legal.computing, 1/31/95.]
(There have already been such cases, but the process can be
expensive. Patent infringement insurance costs about $50K/year,
according to Greg Aharonian.)

Mitch Kapor suggests that software protection should last
2-3 years, as is true for semiconductors (via the Semiconductor
Chip Production Act of 1984). [Information Week, 2/13/95, p. 26.
EDUPAGE.]